Now the stage is set for some sensible immigration policies

Ed Miliband must favour his instincts over voices urging him to the Right,
writes Mary Riddell.

All the world’s a stage. In a speech in London just before the Jubilee celebrations, Herman Van Rompuy used Shakespeare as a metaphor for global affairs. The President of the European Council is hardly the Jude Law of politics. As he remarked during his address at Chatham House: “My successor will have more charisma than me.”

Undeterred, Mr Van Rompuy mustered his little-noticed Thespian skills to quote from As You Like It. “And all the men and women merely players; They have their exits and their entrances.” While noting that the word “exit” made him wince, the president digressed from Greek travails to depict the world as a show for which the audience was beginning to dictate the plot.

Mr Van Rompuy was not the only outsider to focus on Shakespeare as the Jubilee events unfolded. At London’s Globe Theatre, a French company performing Much Ado About Nothing and a Lithuanian Hamlet concluded a season of all 37 plays translated into languages ranging from Polish to Arabic through Mandarin and Swahili.

Shakespeare was an internationalist whose influence stretches from Elsinore to Eritrea. Once, audiences at the Globe included Huguenot immigrants on the run from French persecutors. On Saturday, a doggedly British-style audience, anorak hoods raised against the downpour in the open auditorium, celebrated unity and difference.

Although that tableau was overshadowed by the next day’s river pageant, both events symbolised the best of what Britain has been and must become again – a nation at ease with itself but also displaying open arms and diplomatic muscle. Tomorrow, as the party ends, the politicians who have been bit-part players in the spectacle of the past few days get to influence what comes next.

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Either they can help to establish a meaningful niche in a world growing ever more volatile. Or they can behave as if the solidarity engendered by the Jubilee was merely the effusion of damp crowds projecting their dreams on to the blank screen of royalty. In that case, the relics of Jubilee spirit will be dumped, like a flotsam of plastic Union flags and hats, as social landfill.

Since patriotism, on the past days’ showing, is not in doubt, that leaves foreign policy and immigration as the issues that may ultimately define who we are. On both counts, David Cameron is struggling. Although the Prime Minister has promised, for example, that we will not “abandon the Syrian people”, it is far from clear that Britain is equipped to influence the high-octane diplomacy required to help end slaughter or stave off sectarian war. If Mr Cameron, who is not an instinctive multilateralist, also becomes yet more isolated in Europe, he risks presiding over a garrison country whose knee-jerk response is to raise the drawbridge against a turbulent world. That impulse is already proving dangerous.

The Coalition’s promise to cut net migration to under 100,000 a year has inevitably proved unworkable, with the figure for the first nine months of last year set at 252,000, or the second highest level ever. To reduce levels drastically would mean gravely damaging the economy and losing out in the lucrative competition for student migrants. As the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) has pointed out, new student curbs may cost Britain up to £3 billion a year. With its migration policy in tatters, the Government is reduced to bluster. The Home Secretary, who says she is “contingency planning” for keeping out EU incomers should the eurozone founder, also told The Daily Telegraph recently that she planned to give illegal migrants “a really hostile reception”. That truculence seems to belong to another country, alien to citizens jostling through crowded Tube stations as part of a Jubilee crowd made up of all colours, all races, all religions and all tongues.

In post-Jubilee Britain, Ed Miliband will have to show whether he can do any better. The Labour leader, back from a short break in the south of France, is building a consensus. The whiff of success is a political pheromone to business figures and others now forging or renewing contacts with the leader’s office. Phillip Blond, once touted as Mr Cameron’s “philosopher king” and the high priest of “compassionate Conservatism”, is said to be among those making overtures.

Stories that leading Lib Dems are in talks with the leader’s inner circle with a view to forging a pact are dismissed as “exaggerated”, although Vince Cable does indeed speak to Mr Miliband, albeit “on a very, very occasional basis”. Even so, such straws in the wind add to the impression that Mr Miliband is now seen as a possible, and even a likely, next prime minister. That increases the onus on him to explain what sort of a country he would hope to lead and mould.

Though Mr Miliband and his shadow foreign secretary, Douglas Alexander, are easy internationalists, Labour stands to be wrong-footed on Europe by flirting with the notion of an in/out referendum for which, on the current trends, it might be hard-pressed to secure a Yes vote. As for immigration, Mr Miliband has said little or nothing on an issue that cemented Labour’s status as a lost cause in the 2010 election.

While other senior figures, such as Alan Johnson, have acknowledged that Labour made some errors, Mr Miliband has so far preferred to dwell on personal experience. In a recent article for the New Statesman, he wrote that he “would not be leader of the Labour Party without the trauma of my family history”.

As the grandson of a Jew murdered in a Nazi concentration camp, Mr Miliband understands the “patriotism of the refugee”. His friend and adviser, Marc Stears, in a blog written some time ago to dismiss Lord Glasman’s call for an immigration crackdown, ruled out a “politics of fully open borders” as “a utopian abstraction” while arguing that the pursuit of the common good should be “an instinctively generous politics and not a restrictive one”. If that is also, as seems likely, the view of Mr Miliband, he will have to trust his radical instincts above the voices of those who would like to outflank the Tories’ bankrupt migration policy on the Right.

In a world in flux, Labour cannot afford much more foot-shuffling on immigration and asylum. The economy is suffering, and so is Britain’s claim to be the cohesive country on display throughout the Jubilee. Last week, at a House of Lords reception, the actors Eve Best and Juliet Stevenson read out the stories of two women refugees who, like many others, had fled rape and bloodshed only to be finally broken by the British asylum system. As another brutalised reject said: “I feel like the walking dead.”

With beacons of welcome ablaze around the Commonwealth, we forget at our peril that economic interest decrees a sensible immigration policy, while our shared humanity demands that Britain, a nation of migrants spearheaded by a monarch of German ancestry, offers safety to the tortured. In a Jubilee of fantasy and imagination, listen out amid the celebration of this country’s open-heartedness for a rustle from the chancel of Holy Trinity Church in Stratford. That would be Shakespeare turning in his grave.